Over the past thirty years, research on Quranic manuscripts has made considerable progress. Fundamental works on codicology, palaeography and dating of early Quranic manuscripts have been done, although mainly on those manuscripts originally came from the Western side of the Islamic World such as al-Fusṭāṭ (Old Cairo), Damascus, and Sanaa (Yemen). To have a complete image of the Quran’s textual history, however, it is necessary to include also Quranic manuscripts kept in the collections in the Eastern side of the Islamic world. Quranic manuscripts from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia are rarely taken into account by scholars, which is mostly due to the difficulty to have access to them. In the case of Iran, as the existing though incomplete and outdated catalogues show, the number of Quranic manuscripts and fragments kept in Iranian libraries, museums and even in private collections is considerable. Based on the available catalogues as well as the information that we were able to obtain during our exploratory trips, hundreds of Quranic manuscripts and fragments before the 4th Century CE are kept in several collections in Tehran, Qom, Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz, etc. The actual number of Quranic manuscripts from the first four Islamic centuries is most likely to be significantly higher, although it has been challenging to estimate due to lack of available or updated catalogues.

Thanks to the support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Germany, Irankoran can approach to previously inaccessible collections. This source material offers a new perspective on the textual history of the Quran, for it is the first time that Quranic manuscripts from the Eastern part of the Islamic world are going to be systematically scrutinised.

Irankoran is using and completing the work of the project Corpus Coranicum of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW). Since 2009, Corpus Coranicum has published the first digital comprehensive online catalogue of early Quranic manuscripts, mainly based on the Western part of the Islamic world kept in European collections. It has also developed a system for digital transliteration of Quranic manuscripts.

1. Digitalisation

In the course of the project Irankoran, images of Quranic manuscripts from Iranian collections, together with their metadata, are recorded in an online digital catalogue, “Bibliotheca Coranica Iranica”, according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This online catalogue will present a prototype that will be used by other (previously unavailable) Iranian collections and will help develop more manuscript collections online. The publication path also ensures the accessibility of the data and results obtained in the Islamic world.

2. Digital editions

In addition to the digitalisation of the Iranian of Quranic manuscripts, which makes them accessible to other scholars all over the world, the project aims at preparing digital editions of early Kufic Quranic manuscripts which cover three aspects of the text: (a) spellings of the Quranic text (rasm), (b) variant readings (qirāʾāt), and verse numbering (ʿadd al-āy) in the manuscript. In order to perform this idea, a digital database has been developed where for each word of the Quran, all three information can be recorded.

3. Transliteration

All early Kufic Quranic manuscripts are planned to be transliterated into a typical Arabic typeface (naskh). Letters are written the same way as they appear in the manuscript, usually without, though sometimes with, diacritical dots. In the transliteration, vowel signs are not represented. These digital transliterations display different levels of readability, variant spellings (in comparison to other early manuscripts and modern prints like the Cairo edition), and modifications (corrections, over-writings, additions, and erasures) in the manuscript. To carry this out, Irankoran is following the transliteration system developed by the project Corpus Coranicum in a modified, adapted way in the presentation of modifications in the manuscript.

3. Variant readings

Irankoran also confronts the statements of the Islamic scholarly literature on the variant readings of the Quranic text with the readings as they appear in the early manuscripts. The main question is to what extent the seven readings of the Quran, canonised by the Baghdadian scholar Ibn Muǧāhid (died 936), can assert themselves in early Quranic manuscripts some of which predate his time.

4. Verse numbering

Almost all Quranic manuscripts from early period represent special signs for separating and sometimes numbering the verses. Since we have differences in numbering the Quranic verses which traditionally assumed to be originated from different locals and regions, one would expect that these differences appear in the Quranic manuscript as well. Again, the goal here is to assess the Islamic traditions on verse numbering through registration of the data in each manuscript into the database, and then a detailed survey of them.

5. Dating manuscripts

Dating of the manuscript plays a central role in understanding the history of the Quran. Unfortunately, early Quranic manuscripts usually have no colophon, most probably because the first and/or the last pages of the manuscript are usually exposed to damages. Of course, sometimes one finds pseudo-colophons which later inserted into the last page of manuscripts claiming attribution to the Shīʿī Imāms. Interestingly on the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran, at least one codex is kept that is attributed to Caliph ʿUthmān, in the city of Negel in Kurdestan, which seems very difficult to have access.

Since the paleographical classification of script styles can only provide a relative chronology for early Quranic manuscripts, dating based on radiocarbon analysis (C-14 analysis) seems to be useful. The radiocarbon measurements are carried out in cooperation with the Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics Isotope Laboratory (ETH Zurich).

Concluding Remarks

Irankoran is an interdisciplinary research project for it incorporates the philological analysis of the Quranic manuscripts and scientific dating through C-14 analysis. The results of Irankoran will be published online. Because of its digital dimension, the main goal is to encourage its academic audience of the value of digital publication and to convince the authorities in libraries and collections who still have problems to accept the idea, as it is the case in Europe, in the United States of America, and also often in the Middle East, to put their heritage online.

*Dr. Ali Aghaei is a research fellow at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy ofSciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the head of IranKoran project fundedby the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Germany.

In my recent scholarly visit to Dubai, I came across an interesting ‘Kufic’ Quran fragment, probably from the 4th or 5th-century A.H. The fragment is consisted of seven folios and is kept today at Jumaa al-Majid Centre for Culture and Heritage.

There is almost no information regarding the origins or the history of ownership of this 7-folia Quran, except a small note that appears in the electronic catalogue, stating it was donated to the Emirati institution by an Iraqi professor.

Although the fragment is incomplete and relatively late, it still shares some exciting features in terms of mechanical errors made by the scribe while transcribing the Quranic texts, and the technique he used to correct these errors.

The current article aims at giving a brief description of the manuscript in hand and show a couple of illustrated examples of scribal errors and how they were corrected.

Description of the manuscript

Late Kufic Quran fragment at Juma al-Majid Centre for Culture and Heritage, Dubai, UAE. All photographs/excerpts of Ahmed Shaker

7 consecutive Quranic leaves, written in dark brown ink on a landscaped parchment, 25 lines to the page. Red dots are used to indicate the vowels, and no diacritical points. Verses are not separated by circular dots or dashes, and the 10th-verse marker takes the shape of two crossed lines. Surah headings are added in red ink. The fragment has parts of surahs Ghāfir (Q40), Fuṣṣilat (Q41), al-Shūrā (Q42), al-Zukhruf (Q43), al-Dukhān (Q44), al-Jāthiyah (Q45), al-Aḥqāf (Q46), Muḥammad (Q47), al-Fatḥ (Q48), and al-Ḥujurāt (Q49). Traces of moisture, cuts, lacuna, and modern restoration were detected.

There are some formulas and phrases written on the top of some pages, such as “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful” and “May Allah’s peace be upon the messenger Muhammad”, and marginal writings to identify the juz’ and hizb.

Scribal errors and corrections

I counted several cases in the remaining leaves where the scribe, accidentally, committed mechanical errors and then corrected them either by crossing out the extra word/phrase using red ink or by writing the omitted word/phrase in the body text or margins. In all cases, he always indicates it by drawing a correction mark that looks like an arrow pointing towards the place of error/correction in the parchment.

Here are some examples:

In Q41:22, the scribe omitted ولا أبصاركم ولا جلودكم and then added it in the margin in brown ink.

erratum at Q41:22

In Q42:16, the scribe omitted بعد and then added it in red ink over the line.

erratum at Q42:16

In Q43:69, the scribe repeated وكانوا مسلمين twice (dittography) then crossed it out lightly using red ink. The extra phrase is still legible as if he highlighted it.

.erratum at Q43:69

This final error is striking. In Q41:24, the scribe wrote يحق الله الحق بكلمته instead of يحق الحق بكلمته (called contamination). He then crossed out the extra الله with red ink. Clearly, the scribe confused this verse ending with a similar verse in Q10:82 where it says ويحق الله الحق بكلمته ولو كره الكافرون. This example implies that the scribe was not merely copying from a written exemplar, but orality, too, played a role in the transcribing process of the Quranic text.